Dorothy Dodds BakerBesprekingen
Auteur van Cassandra at the Wedding
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Cassandra has returned to her childhood home to attend her twin’s wedding to a nice, young doctor but she is determined to make her sister call the whole thing off. The book has more than one narrator and I really enjoyed Cassandra’s voice. She’s intense, funny and smart with a definite dark side to her personality. Although her selfishness can seem cruel at times, she was quite likeable. When her twin, Judith became the narrator, I was surprised that I also enjoyed her thoughts and words as well as she definitely has the calmer, more sober personality of the two but she knows and recognizes Cassandra’s darker side.
It is obvious that Cassandra is a lesbian although that fact is never definitely declared in the book. The lesbian overtones are quite subtle which I suspect has a lot to do with the times that the book was published. The family seems to acknowledge and accept Cassandra as she is although Cassandra herself seems to be struggling at times. Cassandra at the Wedding is beautifully written, darkly witty, clever and atmospheric. Dorothy Baker strikes me as a very accomplished author who knows how to write comedy. She also trusts her readers to understand and draw their own conclusions and so doesn’t lay everything out on a platter.
La trama è presto detta. Ci sono due gemelle: una (Judith) sta per sposarsi, ma l'altra (Cassandra) non prende bene la notizia. È davvero tutto qui – o almeno l'intero romanzo si sviluppa da quest'idea. Adesso potrei parlarvi delle difficoltà che Cassandra incontra nel farsi una propria vita distinta da quella della gemella, determinata invece a “staccarsi” dal suo doppio. Potrei, ma questo aspetto del romanzo è stato efficacemente trattato da Peter Cameron nella postfazione inserita in calce a questa edizione di Fazi Editore.
Preferisco parlare invece dell'aspetto queer, visto che si muove non visto per tutto il corso del romanzo. Dico non visto perché è una tematica mai esplicitamente affrontata: Cassandra a un certo punto butta là casualmente di avere una non ben specificata avversione e/o disagio affettivo verso gli uomini e di trovarsi meglio con le donne. Tutto qui.
Troppo poco? No, se pensate che un altro tema del romanzo è l'incapacità di arrendersi e di accontentarsi di una vita “normale” – e forse anche un po' della gelosia verso chi, invece, ci riesce. Anche Cassandra vorrebbe probabilmente trovare qualcuno con cui stare e sistemarsi per bene. Solo che il suo qualcuno, il qualcuno che potrebbe renderla felice, non le permetterebbe comunque di rientrare nei ranghi della “normalità” – e teniamo conto che il romanzo è del 1962.
Quindi Cassandra, tra le altre cose, si trova stretta tra una vita attuale insoddisfacente e l'impossibilità di uscirne a causa sia della sua riluttanza ad abbracciare la normalità socialmente accettata sia ad affrontare se stessa (che potremmo ulteriormente scindere in necessità di vedersi come individuo distinto dalla gemella e come donna lesbica).
Un romanzo bello denso, insomma. Aggiungeteci il talento per il dialogo di Dorothy Baker e avrete un libro assolutamente godibile e che andrebbe analizzato nei corsi di lettura (lo sappiamo quanto sia difficile scrivere dei dialoghi che non facciano collassare dalla noia i lettori, no?).
Cassandra is a graduate student at Berkeley, who returns home for Judith's wedding to a seemingly ideal young doctor. Cassandra's hope when she returns is to sabotage the wedding. Cassandra seems to be very self-absorbed and hates that the other half to her whole is going to be someone else's half. Her ultimate attempt to interfere with the wedding is a remarkable example of her selfishness. Their mother died two years before the wedding day, and their father is a pompous, alcoholic philosophy professor. Their maternal grandmother lives in the home, and adds a gracious, if slightly unaware presence.
This beautifully written book will stay with me for a while. Written in 1962, it contains elements of that era as represented by the wedding gifts and the grandmother's insistence on public perception. It is short on plot, but very long on character development. The interactions of the family members are fascinating.
he was underage, or to the guys in the band that he was just a white kid. He started out in the slums of LA with nothing, and he ended up on
top of the game in the speakeasies and nightclubs of New York. But while talent and drive are all you need to make it in music, they aren’t enough to make it through a life.
Review of the Daunt Books paperback edition (2018) of the original Houghton Mifflin hardcover (1962)
[3.5]
The Edwards sisters are 24 year-old twins. Cassandra has settled in for a life of academia at California Berkeley University and pianist Judith has been attending the Julliard School of Music in NYC. In New York, Judith has met John Thomas Finch, a doctor, and they have come to the family ranch home in Putnam, California for their wedding. Cassandra goes home as well, not planning to attend the wedding, but with the intention of stopping it.
We learnt, the day we found our favourite, where hurt lies and where comfort against it. And I knew right now, with the birds picking my brain, why I'd been asked to the wedding. I'd been asked because I could stop it in time. I could stage a last minute rescue.
It turns out that Cassandra has an obsessive fixation about her sister and about the previous life that they enjoyed together in Berkeley, before Judith left to attend the prestigious NYC music school. Her thesis writing is stalled and she has convinced herself that if the sisters' lives went back to the way they were before, that life would be better. The family has an overhanging issue due to the death of the mother at a relatively young age. There is a controlling grandmother and an alcoholic father on the scene. As the blurb below states, the opening 20 pages are quite engrossing and draw you in to Cassandra's life as she makes her way back to Putnam. After that it does become a bit of a slog though, until an incident on the eve of the wedding brings events to a crisis point.
See blurb at https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FbmLnZbXoAA-tg-?format=jpg&name=large
Staff Pick blurb for 'Cassandra at the Wedding' from Shakespeare and Company, Paris. Image sourced from Twitter.
This recent 2018 Daunt Books paperback lacks an Introduction or Afterword unlike the slightly older NYRB 2012 edition with an Afterword by Deborah Eisenberg. The NYRB Classics Reading Group Guide though is still (as of early September 2022) freely available here. As an alternative to an Introduction, Dorothy Baker's (1907-1968) biography on Wikipedia is informative.
Although the Daunt Books synopsis would seem to highlight Cassandra's lesbian lifestyle ("Cassandra is gay, brilliant, nerve-wracked, miserable...") there is actually very little in this novel to make it qualify as LGBTQ+ fiction. Baker may have become more restrained about those portrayals after the reaction to her earlier lesbian pulp play and novel [book:Trio|1598603] (1943) [no longer in print].
I read Cassandra at the Wedding through its inclusion in the 2022 Year of Reading subscription from the English language bookstore Shakespeare and Company in Paris, France.
Trivia and Link
Cassandra at the Wedding was the featured book on the Backlisted Podcast October 18, 2021 and you can listen to that episode here.
From the first paragraph, the reader realises there's something a little odd about Cassie.
As the tale progresses, a whole host of issues are revealed or hinted at - a recently deceased mother, who had issues of her own; Cassie's need to remain with her twin- even as cracks have developed in their relationship; mental illness, anorexia; an unsuccessful lesbian affair.
This is class writing. I can't say I enjoyed it- it felt like spending a day in a psychiatric unit with a very demanding patient. But highly accomplished.
When the novel opens, eponymous Cassandra is on her way home from Berkeley where she is working on her thesis, to her father's ranch in Northern California for her twin sister Judith's wedding. It's the early 1960s and these twins have grown up thinking they only need each other and Cassandra still feels that way. But she now knows that Judith probably doesn't otherwise why would she be getting married and planning to live across the country in NY?They used to share an apartment at Berkeley but earlier that year she had moved to NY. And Cassandra is miffed. But she has other problems that are slowly revealed over the short novel's pages but it pretty much all boils down to the relationship between these two sisters.
The writing is stunning. The cast of characters, although quite short, is brilliant: drunken, arrogant father; meek, aim to please grandmother; future perfect husband Jake and the twins, Judith, a brilliant pianist and Cassandra, a brilliant writer if she can allow herself to be because lurking in the background throughout the novel is Jane, the twin's mother for whom they are still grieving after her death a few years prior.
I loved it. But listening to the Backlisted podcast after I read the book added another whole dimension to the appreciation of this book. I'm pretty sure I'll be doing a lot of that in the future.
The novel was published in 1962 and was the last of the four novels Dorothy Baker wrote. I recently read her first novel [Young Man with a Horn] and was so impressed by Baker's handling of dialogue that I wanted to read this novel which is said to be her best. Dorothy Baker's husband claimed that the novel was based on their own two daughters and certainly the dialogue between the two crackles with an intensity that feels like it could have actually taken place. Like her first novel there is hardly a word out of place.
The first part of the novel is from the POV of Cassandra. She is travelling from Berkley California to her parents ranch some 5 hours away. She wants to see her sister who has returned home to prepare for her wedding. We learn that the sisters had set up house together in Berkley but nine months ago Judith had left and had now met a man she wants to marry. Cassandra had only been alone for three weeks before seeking help from psychiatry. Now on her journey home the anxiety that she feels is expressed by her first telephone call to her parents home where it is revealed she is travelling one day earlier than planned to see her sister before the wedding. She finally gets to speak to Judith and her knees "buckle with recognition" when she hears her sisters voice. For the majority of the novel we hear Cassandra's side of the story, her view of the close relationship with her sister and their relationship with their father and Granny who still lives at home. A smaller chunk of the novel is from Judith's point of view before we are back with Cassie.
Baker is able to pinpoint in some detail the sisters' state of mind through their actions and conversations. Because much of the novel is from Cassie's POV she is seen as a sort of victim, the one who will lose most from Judith's marriage. The family unit is a little reclusive living out on the ranch and their father is a professor who has sought solace in brandy after the early death of his wife. The two sisters like him are very intelligent, but this does not help them solve their emotional issues, nobody behaves badly, but extricating themselves from the emotional trauma of their separation proves to be impossible without hurting the more vulnerable Cassie.
The micro world of this novel is not going to shed any light on the human condition, but it does focus extremely well on a vary small incident within it. From the first few pages the quality of the writing hooked me into Cassie and the families' issues, but as the story unfolded I thought the novel lost a little of its intensity. However a very good read and so 4 stars.
3 
baswood | 23 andere besprekingen | Dec 4, 2019 |
baswood | 23 andere besprekingen | Dec 4, 2019 | Cassie is examining her life right before our eyes. Incomplete without her sister. Miserable and self absorbed. I would have loved reading this book in the early 1960's as a young impressionable adolescent. Maybe 12 or 13, eight grade. I would have eaten it up and read it under the covers wrh a flashlight or turned the bed side light on when all had gone to sleep.
A simple story then, but Dorothy Baker does something different; she is intent on getting across to her readers Rick Martins passion for music. She describes the intensity of his playing and his need to push himself further in musical terms, that amateur musicians and others who have similar passions will understand. Rick Martin was a poor white boy from Los Angeles who discovered he had an ear for tunes and set about teaching himself to play hymns on an old piano he found in the basement of a church. The church congregation were black folks and when they discovered Rick one night they frightened him half to death. Rick could be described as a "loner" only meeting people through music and when he does make a friend it is with Smoke a black youth who plays drums. It is Smoke who gets Rick interested in jazz as Rick is already changing around the hymn tunes that he has learned and the two young men hook up with Jeff Williams and his hot band of black musicians. Rick finds himself in a world of young black people in 1920's America, but to Rick and the book as a whole this is incidental, because it is the music that drives his world.
Later Rick gets a job as a musician in an all white band as he would be expected to do, but although he enjoyed the playing he is continually striving to be the best and finds the only way of really stretching himself is to play with the black musicians. He becomes relatively well off and very much respected: a musician's musician, he has switched from piano to trumpet and is the star in whichever group he performs. He cannot however push his head through the glass ceiling that he encounters, his attempts to get a band featuring black musicians to record does not attract the financial backing that he needs. He marries a society white girl who is attracted by his talent, but cannot live her life centred around Rick's music and Rick becomes frustrated and uses alcohol to fuel his talent........
The first sentence of the book says:
"In the first place he shouldn't have got himself mixed up with negroes"
This proves to be ambiguous, because without being "mixed up" in the world of black musicians Rick probably would not have discovered his passion, his purpose in life. The musical world that these black people inhabit is the backbone of this novel and Baker makes a wonderful job of describing the feeling of joy that they find in the playing of jazz music. Here is Jeff Williams leader and piano player putting the band through their paces:
"Jeff led them to it with four bars in the key and then the horns came in together held lightly by a slim melody by three separate leashes. Then Jeff led the rhythm to the drums, and the piano became the fourth voice, and from then on harmony prevailed in a strange coherence, each man improvising wildly on his own and the four of them managing to fit it together and tightly. Feeling ran high, and happy inspiration followed happy inspiration to produce counterpoint that you'd swear somebody had sat down and worked out note by note on nice clean manuscript paper. But nobody had: it came into the heads of four men and out again by way of three horns and one piano"
Dorothy Baker's prose takes inspiration from the hard-bitten crime novels such as those by Raymond Chandler that were flooding the market in the 1930's. Her novel has run its course in just over 120 pages and the feeling is that hardly a word has been wasted. Quite simply this is one of the best novels that pins down a musical milieu that I have read and so 5 stars.
2 baswood | 5 andere besprekingen | Sep 15, 2019 |
baswood | 5 andere besprekingen | Sep 15, 2019 | The Aristophanes connection is accurate, but it's also kind of simplistic—the book is about a lot more than just the rending of the one from the one true love. There's a whole lot about family—how it gets pulled apart, the traps parents set for their children (that whole "we don't need other people" ethos they grew up with), young people trying to pull away and find their own identities in the face of such an overbearing family unit. I got a very strong feeling of someone in middle age musing about what it is to be young, that period of time before your sense of your own self has settled in. Baker would have been what, in her 50s when she wrote this? It's definitely a mature gaze on events, even though the story is told in Cassandra's voice.
2 lisapeet | 23 andere besprekingen | Apr 28, 2018 |
lisapeet | 23 andere besprekingen | Apr 28, 2018 | Nos asomamos a un trozo de realidad arrancado a lo vivo de sus protagonistas, sin juzgar ni encontrar soluciones bienpensantes, esperando que su vida tome algún rumbo "normal" aunque no te queda ninguna seguridad de ello.
“Our man is, I hate to say it, an artist, burdened with that difficult baggage, the soul of an artist. But he hasn’t got the thing that should go with it – and which I suppose seldom does – the ability to keep the body in check while the spirit goes on being what it must be. And he goes to pieces, but not in any small way. He does it so thoroughly that he kills himself doing it.”
The young man in question is Rick Martin – who we are introduced to by an unnamed narrator. From the prologue we know that Rick has already come to a sad end – and that the story of his all too short life is being told by someone who witnessed his rise and fall.
“There isn’t much to it, in its bare outline. Rick was born in Georgia five or ten minutes before his mother died and some ten days before his father checked out and left him with his seventeen year old aunt and her brother. These two worked their way to Los Angeles eight years later and brought him with them; and there he grew up in the way he apparently had to go. He learned to play the piano by fooling around with the pianos in churches and roadhouses – any place, in fact, where there was a piano that could be got at and fooled around with. And because he had right in his bones whatever it takes to make music, he became while he was still a kid a very good pianist. But a piano wasn’t exactly right for him, and he turned to brass finally; he earned enough money to buy himself a horn.”
We first meet Rick when he is just a boy, with no idea at all of playing music, no idea of jazz, and the musicians who make jazz their lives. With his aunt and uncle – who have charge of him (I won’t say care) Rick moves to Los Angeles. Although only young, Rick is left largely to his own devices, he has a bed of his own a cupboard for his clothes and that it seems is pretty much all he has. There is little mention of his uncle and aunt (a brother and sister who both go out to work) except to say that his aunt provides him with trousers from the factory where she works. Rick has struggled to get on at school – so many other kids already far ahead of him. After grammar school – from where everyone graduates no matter what – Rick has to enrol at High school – but for a year or so he simply doesn’t go.
Instead Rick takes to hanging round the All Soul’s Mission, which is empty for much of the day. Here Rick begins to mess around with the piano – and a musician is born. Rick finds he can pick up a tune quickly – he practises all day – until the mission becomes too dark for him to see. All Rick can think of is music, improving, trying new things – it develops into an obsession. Finding a job at the local bowling alley – for a time still skipping school, until they catch up with him, Rick is desperate to save up enough money to buy a trumpet – having decided he wants to play the horn. Here he meets Smoke Jordan, a jazz musician himself, Rick finds in Smoke a life-long friend, and through him enters into the world of jazz.
“After Rick came to Gandy’s, Smoke knew with the instinct of a compass where his audience was, and he came to sweep almost exclusively behind the bowling alleys where there was no great need of it. And there it was that the black one taught the white one what rhythm is, and not by precept, either. By example.”
The jazz world in the 1920’s is a very colour-conscious world. There are black musicians and white musicians and they generally don’t play together. Rick is white, Smoke Jordan is black, and the jazz musicians that he introduces Rick to are also black. While the white musicians are the ones who become famous – the black musicians play in relative obscurity. Rick just wants to play jazz. I had expected to encounter the unpleasant racial epithets of the time – and while they made me uncomfortable, I was cheered by Rick’s unconcern of colour. He chooses his friends and colleagues among the people who he admires, who can teach him something and with whom he shares a great passion.
The novel skips forward a few years, and we meet Rick at twenty – he has now become a gifted horn player. Jack Stuart a bandleader from Balboa – a seaside town thirty miles away – takes Rick on as first trumpet.
From Balboa Rick goes to New York, this time poached by another big time band leader. In New York Rick finds himself back with Smoke Jordan and the other musicians he had regaled his friends in Balboa with stories of. Playing and recording with whichever group of musicians want him, Rick plays jazz most of the night, and sleeps most of the day. Rick is destined for stardom it seems – still so young and at the peak of his brilliance. It is his meeting with Amy North which seems to herald the beginning of the end. Rick is bowled over by Amy, and rashly marries her, predictably perhaps the relationship is a disaster – and from here on the end really isn’t far away.
It is in the ‘voice’ of this novel I think that Baker really shines – so authentic it gives an extra dimension to the atmosphere of this novel. While some of the musical details might well go a little over the heads of those of us who don’t play or read music – the non-musician can still appreciate the all-encompassing obsession that truly gifted jazz musicians enjoy. The relationship between Rick and Smoke poignantly portrayed with subtle understanding is one of my favourite aspects of the novel.
1 Heaven-Ali | 5 andere besprekingen | May 8, 2016 |
Heaven-Ali | 5 andere besprekingen | May 8, 2016 | Cassandra at the Wedding was Dorothy Baker’s final novel – published in 1962 – it is a story far darkly, comic than the deceptively cosy title might lead one to expect. I actually have Young Man with a Horn tbr too – which was Bakers first novel. I wondered whether I should have started with that novel – but something about this appealed far more – it is one I have heard only good things about. The narrative voice is unforgettable – a character that is at once sympathetic and disturbing – Cassandra Edwards is the first person narrator of two of the three sections of the novel – the middle section being narrated by her sister Judith. Right from the beginning there is something in Cassandra’s tone that alerts us to trouble ahead.
“ I think all the time I was sizing up the bridge that the strong possibility was I’d go home, attend my sister’s wedding as invited, help hook-and-zip her into whatever she wore, take over the bouquet while she received the ring, through the nose or on the finger, wherever she chose to receive it, and hold my peace when it became a question of speaking now or forever holding it. I’d go, in all likelihood, and do everything an only attendant is expected to do. I’d probably dance attendance.
I didn’t even know who the groom was beyond that he was a graduate medical student she met in New York, and his name was Lynch, or maybe even Finch. Yes. Finch. John Thomas Finch. Where’d she meet him – Birdland?”
Cassandra is an identical twin; eleven minutes older than her sister Judith. On a hot day in June – the longest day in fact – she shuts up her apartment in Berkeley, California and sets off for her family’s ranch. Her sister Judith is getting married, and Cassandra’s attendance is required. Tidying away her thesis and covering up the piano she shared with her sister while they still lived together – Cassandra gets into the Riley that was once her mother’s for the five hour drive to the wedding she has no wish to go to. In the back is a dress she bought on her grandmother’s account to wear at the wedding Cassandra doesn’t believe should be taking place. The sisters have always been close – barely spending time apart – they had originally shared the apartment in Berkeley – until Judith suddenly decided to move to New York. In the apartment the Bösendorfer piano stands as a symbol of their tie to each other.
Cassandra is a brilliant graduate student, seemingly living on her nerves, she is miserable since her sister left for New York – convinced as she is that the two of them together only make one whole. The twins had previously little need of other people, they had existed very much for each other, Judith’s departure for New York was devastating for Cassandra – impacting on her health, her work and her emotions. Cassandra is hell-bent on sabotaging the wedding, barely eating, drinking far too much, she’s in a bitterly conniving mood when she sets off for the Sierras.
Cassandra is gay – she later tries to explain her feeling about men to her sister Judith.
“With men I feel like a bird in the clutch of a cat, terrified, caught in a nightmare of confinement, wanting nothing but to get free and take a shower.”
So struggling a little with her sexuality her grief over her mother’s death; a writer to whom Cassandra fears she is unable to live up to, wrestling with her thesis and missing her sister from whom she has been unused to being apart – Cassandra has become very disturbed. She has been consulting a therapist – and carries with her in a white clutch bag – sleeping pills and uppers. Growing up the two girls – very much at their mother’s instigation – were encouraged to develop their own identity – she had refused point blank to ever allow the girls to dress alike. Only now as Cassandra considers the possibility of Judith moving further away from her – severing the whole she believes them to be – she seems to be losing a sense of her own identity. On the road to her family home – Cassandra stops for a while at a roadside bar – catching sight of herself in the mirrored surface behind the bar.
“By a firm act of will I forced the face between the shelves to stop becoming Judith’s and become mine. My very own face – the face of a nice girl preparing to be a teacher, writing a thesis, being kind to her grandmother, going home a day early instead of a day late or the day I said, and bringing something decent to wear. But it can give me a turn, that face, any time I happen to catch it in a mirror; most particularly at times like this when I’m alone and have to admit it’s really mine because there’s no one else to accuse.”
Judith is engaged to a young doctor Jack Finch; the wedding is due to be quiet – just Judith, Cassandra their philosophy professor father, grandmother and the groom himself. Noticeably absent of course their mother Jane, who died three years earlier – the family ranch, however is filled with her presence. It’s only upon Cassandra’s arrival at the ranch that we meet the rest of the family – the twins’ hard drinking father – who retired from teaching unconventionally young – their well-meaning maternal grandmother, who is keen to feed, and who appears to have replaced her daughter as the mother figure in the household.
With Jack’s arrival the following day expected, and Judith planning to go and pick him up from the airport – Cassandra begins at once to try and put a spoke in the wheel. She shows herself to be selfish, reckless, self-absorbed, bossy and overly reliant on her sister. The reader may not always like her much but surely we can all sympathise with her misery – heartbroken as she is at what she fears she is losing. Baker throws some wonderfully comic touches into this short novel – so that this story never becomes too dark – there’s lightness and shade and some funny one liners – generally spoken by Cassandra – who I really rather loved, despite everything.
This is a wonderfully subtle novel – although it has a very definite sixties setting – there is a classic timelessness to it which prevents it ever feeling dated. I’m very glad I began with Dorothy Baker’s final novel – for me it feels as if it was a great place to start.
4 Heaven-Ali | 23 andere besprekingen | Feb 14, 2016 |
Heaven-Ali | 23 andere besprekingen | Feb 14, 2016 | The storyline is about a youngster named Rick Martin, who in just passing by pawn shops and seeing the instruments becomes enamoured by them and he stops daily and looks by the hour at these instruments and imagines playing them. He pulls a tune out of his head and imagines playing; what notes he would pull, how long he would hold them, etc. He teaches himself to play the trumpet and the piano in this manner. The book is only biographical to his music. The remainder of his story is fictional. He becomes a wonderful musician and is quite recognized by like musicians.
I know my description of this book does it nowhere the credit it deserves. It is a wonderful, humorous & yet sad story with extraordinary characters.
This was a five star read for me and I KNOW that I will read it again and probably again, as I have Of Lena Geyer. Young Man With a Horn is a wonderful book and I truly loved it. My best read of 2012 thus far.
3 rainpebble | 5 andere besprekingen | Mar 13, 2012 |
rainpebble | 5 andere besprekingen | Mar 13, 2012 | Onze site gebruikt cookies om diensten te leveren, prestaties te verbeteren, voor analyse en (indien je niet ingelogd bent) voor advertenties. Door LibraryThing te gebruiken erken je dat je onze Servicevoorwaarden en Privacybeleid gelezen en begrepen hebt. Je gebruik van de site en diensten is onderhevig aan dit beleid en deze voorwaarden.
Also I love books that are about incredibly specific parts of California, which this book delivers perfectly.